The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
An Application Gateway acts as an intermediary between business logic applications such as inventory control, human resources applications, or others. An intermediary is used to enable communication among applications that have non-standard interfaces. Furthermore, in some cases a core set of functions is implemented in each application independently, and valuable resources and many operational difficulties can be reduced by centralizing such functions at an application gateway.
Existing Application Gateway products are primarily implemented as application software that the user runs on a server. Thus, they operate at the level of sockets and messages. As a result, past application gateway products have introduced delays or latency in communications among applications. Examples of prior products include the Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) from Cisco Systems, Inc., which is operable at Layer 2 or Layer 3 but not Layer 6 and higher layers; the BIGIP unit from F5; and products from Citrix, Juniper Networks, Tuxedo, and the Web Services Business-to-Business Gateway from IBM.